urlview(1) urlview(1)
NAME
urlview - URL extractor/launcher
SYNOPSIS
urlview filename [ filename ... ]
DESCRIPTION
urlview is a screen oriented program for extracting URLs from text
files and displaying a menu from which you may launch a command to
view a specific item.
CONFIGURATION
urlview attempts to read ~/.urlview upon startup. If this file
doesn't exist, it will try to read a system wide file in
/etc/urlview.conf. There are two configuration commands (order does
not matter):
REGEXP regexp
urlview uses a regular expression to extract URLs from the
specified text files. \r, \t, \n and \f are all converted to
their normal printf(3) meanings. The default REGEXP is:
(((https?|ftp|gopher)://|(mailto|file|news):)[^' <>"]+|(www|web|w3).[-a-z0-9.]+)[^' .,;<>"):]
COMMAND command
If the specified command contains a %s, it will be subsituted
with the URL that was requested, otherwise the URL is appended to
the COMMAND string. The default COMMAND is:
url_handler.sh %s
Note: You should never put single quotes around the %s. urlview does
this for you, and also makes sure that single quotes eventually
showing up inside the URL are handled properly. (Note that this
shouldn't happen with the default regular expression, which explicitly
excludes single quotes.)
FILES
/etc/urlview.conf
system-wide urlview configuration file
~/.urlview
urlview configuration file
SEE ALSO
printf(3), regcomp(3), regex(7)
AUTHOR
Michael Elkins <me@cs.hmc.edu>.
- 1 - Formatted: December 13, 2025
urlview(1) urlview(1)
Modified for Debian by Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@debian.org>.
Modified for SuSE by Dr. Werner Fink <werner@suse.de> and Stepan Kasal
<kasal@suse.cz>.
Changes put together by Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>.
- 2 - Formatted: December 13, 2025
